The curse of the long-running Dame Shirley Porter saga has come back to bite those who brought her to justice with an extraordinary hearing, which started this week, of an adjudication panel of the Standards Board for councillors' conduct.

Porter, it might be remembered, evaded for a decade a finding by a district auditor that she was responsible for the worst gerrymandering case for years: the cynical "homes for votes" ploy in the 1980s that rehoused potential Labour-voting homeless people outside Westminster so the homes could go instead to Tory-voting types in key marginal wards.

Last year, Porter agreed to pay £12m of the £42m surcharge she owed. Much of that success was due to the persistence of a dedicated band of Labour councillors - three of whom are now MPs - who prodded, probed and pushed until a reluctant Tory-controlled Westminster council finally got its woman.

Now one of the councillors who blew the whistle, Paul Dimoldenberg, the Labour group leader, is up before the board for allegedly bringing the council into disrepute. His crime? Leaking confidential information to the media that led to a speeding up of the search for the missing millions.

Dimoldenberg faces potential political ruin: he could be disqualified as a councillor. His case, say critics, illustrates everything that is wrong about the board - recently lambasted by the anti-sleaze watchdog, the Committee for Standards in Public Life.

The procedure has taken 18 months and the Westminster council standards committee that examined his case contains three members who used to work with Porter. The business has a nasty political smell.